All of this gets mixed well in a bowl – I always use my hands, it’s the way my mom did it, and probably the way her mother fixed the meatloaf. When it’s thoroughly blended together, shape burger patties. I got four out of my bowl, rather on the thin side, but that was my goal.

Alex is lactose-intolerant, so I am trying to avoid all milk products in his food (of course). For the liquid in the meatloaf recipe, I used almond milk, a very reasonable substitute, and I read in a ‘milk free’ cookbook about using olive oil and water to fry things in that would usually use butter or copious amounts of some other fat. I was curious to see how this would work, and so to fry the burgers, I thinly coated the bottom of the hot skillet with olive oil, probably using a teaspoon of oil at the most, placed the burgers in and then added about a 1/4-1/2 cup water and cooked them over medium/high heat. It worked beautifully. The water boiled out, allowing the burgers to brown a bit, and then I flipped them over, added another 1/4 cup water and let that boil out. I probably could have skipped the olive oil altogether. The burgers were browned, moist and tasted like ‘food’, not frying fat. Amazing.

The salad dressing was made in less than five minutes and then tossed with chopped romaine lettuce- perfect. It was a lovely meal that I began at 4:15 pm and was serving right at 5. Can’t really ask for more than that, now can we?